Rants, reviews, and resources to help sustain sustainable eating.

Archive for the ‘Vegetarian’ Category

Happy New Year ‘s everyone. Here in Chez Wannabe-sustainable (aka Caliban’s Kitchen), we rang in the New Year with an amazing roast beef dinner courtesy of Fleischer’s butchers in Kingston, New York. Ironic, since my New Year’s resolution is to cut down on my meat consumption or more exactly stop eating it when I eat out.

One of the first things I did when I started my quest to understand what eating with a conscious means was to eliminate our in-house consumption of industrial –farmed red meat and chicken. I stopped buying the bacon you get in the supermarket. I stopped buying the beef you by in the supermarket. I stopped buying chicken that wasn’t humanely farmed. And I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out places to buy local grass-fed beef – hence my pilgrimage to Fleischer’s upstate. But so far, outside of the house, I’ve been a little loosey-goosey about what I eat. My model has been based on the kosher folks I grew up with — kosher in the house but outside, it was shrimp cocktail or bacon and eggs.

I truly believe that being a vegetarian is the right thing to do. It’s healthier. It’s better for the world. (And I live with a man who’s been a vegetarian for over 15 years.) But I just haven’t been able to do it. (Or is it that I don’t want to do it?) Maybe it’s a process of moving my actions closer to my convictions. If that’s true, my baby step of a sort, is to go vegetarian when I’m eating outside of the house. That probably means no more tandoori chicken, no more street tacos and no more Szechuan pork from that great Chinese restaurant on 40th. Sigh.

But just for clarification, it probably won’t mean no more eating meat at other people’s houses. And it doesn’t mean I am going to make my kids become vegetarians in restaurants – but I will encourage them to stay away from industrial-raised meat. B and I have already been trying to get Z to stop eating so many of those industrial raised hamburgers. Unfortunately, one of his current points of pride is that he can eat more school hamburgers than anyone else in his class.

I hope they will follow my example and my baby step will lead to their baby steps. I say baby step but I know it’s not really going to be that easy. Have I mentioned how much I love tandoori chicken? Get ready for some whining.